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Monday, May 11

could this be swine flu?

I have the flu. I haven't clogged up Kaiser Permanente's advice nurse hotline in a fevered panic, to go through symptoms, or otherwise made a spectacle of myself.

Nope. When in doubt, just stay the heck at home and get into bed.

Been in bed off and on for about 2 days now. Drinking tea, dosing on wondrous medicaments like Thera-Flu and Nyquil, and getting plenty of sunshine puttering in my garden when my energy allows it.

If this is indeed THE swine flu, the one that Obama set the 'let's save the pork industry' tone on when he referred to it as H1N1 or whatevertheheck, it's not too bad. But that's because I don't have a compromised immune system, keep relatively healthy and active, and try to get as much sleep as I can day to day.

I'm all for renaming this bug '3 Critters Flu', or how about the 'Three-Way Flu'? The WHO seems to be backpedaling on whence it came, and trying to not trace it to shitty feedlot management (Smithfield is real big in eastern Europe, as well as North America, and I'm sure they have their jaundiced eye on lots of other regions to exploit), so you know something is rotten in Denmark.

I mean, within the first week that it made the news, the genes were traced to pigs, chickens and humans, were they not? Eh. Maybe that's been revised, but deep down I think the lefty bloggers (me among them) called it when it first made the news.

Where did I get it? Well, who knows. I'm going to take the Joe Biden theory of contagion, however, and extrapolate a bit, because I ride public transportation to and from work five days a week, and it's a train with poor ventilation. And people are pigs in public, and don't cover their mouths when they sneeze or cough. Nothing new there. If I am standing on a train platform, and the dude to my left sneezes, and I can literally see the spray in the air as the sun shines through it and creates a rainbow, it is not rocket science to deduce that I am probably going to inhale some of those droplets if I cannot swiftly exit stage right.